Oct

10

This has been hanging around in my drafts folder for a while – just another of those musings on things that I’m hearing coming out of the non-media.

Gotta love the delusion that makes this sound reasonable:

Ever since Obama announced that (finger-quotes) the gloves are off (finger-quotes), every time I question anything about his background or politics, Barack Obama has said that I was lying!

So, it’s a purely factual statement – kinda. The Obama campaign has certainly started -finally- calling McCain out on his and his campaign’s lies. And the fact that they’ve had to say ‘That’s a lie” as often as they have – and backed up their assertion of lying – tells me a lot more about McCain than about Obama. Like… that he and his campaign with his explicit permission are a pack of liars. And that’s being kind.

Meanwhile, I’m not entirely certain where this whole ‘Obama can’t connect with people emotionally’ polemic comes from, especially since one of the talking points of the radical conservative right is that Obama is connecting TOO WELL with his Obamabots. Honestly, Obama connects FAR more emotionally with my ethics and my beliefs than all the smirking nastiness from the McCain campaign. The only emotion that Sarah Palin’s cornpone anti-intellecutalism inspires in me is disgust. All I have seen from that woman since day one is the kind of nastiness that is typical of playground bullies and “mean girls”. From Obama’s camp, I see a belief in the actual REAL goodness of the American people, not the faked goodness of global dominance. I see a call to accountability in Obama’s assertion that “We are the change we have been waiting for” (Sidenote: one of the most infuriating songs of the past several years was the Gen-Y anthem “Waiting for the world to change” – you can’t WAIT for the world to change – you have to be the change you want to see. THAT is what I hear when Obama says “We ARE the change.” We ARE. We MUST be.)

I am not blind. I do not think Obama is perfect. I do not think he is the Messiah. I do not excuse some things I see as lacking in character. At the risk of being called un-American, I do not like it that he chose to distance himself from his church for the sake of political expediency. What is wrong with calling America out on her faults? Are we to believe that she has none? I understand as a matter of politics that if he had stepped up and said that the church is more than Reverend Wright’s polemic, that Reverend Wright asks the hard questions and forces his parishioners to think outside their boxes, question their beliefs, question authority – including his own – if Obama had said that, he would have been knocked out of the race before it ever started.